A rumble, a whoosh, then Timothy was gone

Jun. 27, 2012

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Services

Visitation for Timothy Stansbury will be 4:30-6:45 p.m. Friday at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 8250 Cornell Road, Montgomery. The funeral service is at 7 p.m. A private burial will follow on Saturday.

MIAMI TWP. — A small group of hikers stood in the early morning darkness, listening and wondering.

What’s that rumbling sound? Nobody knew.

On Friday, Trevor Stansbury, 43, and his sons, Timothy, 13, and Jonathan, 12, were on the last leg of what had been an exhilarating eight-day guided hike through the Himalayan region of Nepal in South Asia. Along the way they’d seen many pack horses; maybe the sound was galloping hooves, Trevor thought.

Suddenly Trevor heard a loud whoosh, what sounded to him like a meteorite streaking to earth, and a whack, like a baseball bat hitting a punching bag.

Then the awful realization: Timothy, who had been right beside him, was gone, killed instantly by a rolling boulder.

“I’ve cried a sea of tears,” the father of four said Monday evening, one day after he and Jonathan returned to their Clermont County home. “The reservoirs are just empty.”

With his wife, Becky, 40, seated beside him, and their other children, Hannah, 9, and Rachel, 6, in another room, he said he won’t allow himself to dwell on questions that begin, “What if?”

What if the hikers hadn’t stopped on the trail to take off their jackets?

What if they had started a few minutes later?

What if they hadn’t made the trip at all?

“ ‘What if’ is an expression of fear and doubt,” Trevor said. “We don’t live our lives in fear. We live our lives in faith.”

The Stansburys moved to Cincinnati from Arizona 11 years ago to launch a software business. Five years later, Trevor began climbing mountains in Colorado. As his boys grew older, he introduced them to the pastime, which they immediately loved.

Last year, the boys reached a 14,000-foot summit in for the first time.

The trip to the Himalayas had been in the works for more than a year. It “seemed like a really neat thing to share with the boys,” Trevor said. Becky agreed.

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The timing seemed perfect: Timothy had just completed eighth grade at Loveland Middle School. Better to do it before high school, they felt, when he’d be busier than ever.

They signed on with Himalayan Glacier Trekking, a 20-year-old Nepal-based company that specializes in adventure travel. The company did not respond to messages left on Tuesday.

The plan, at first, was to hike primarily in Tibet, but visa problems forced an itinerary change, Trevor said. The focus became the Annapurna Conservation Area, a region in north-central Nepal with numerous peaks above 20,000 feet.

It’s been called the “holy grail of trekking” by Backpacker magazine.

Beautiful vistas awaited the hikers

The goal was not to climb a mountain. Rather, their trek took them on trails flanked by snowy mountains and glaciers. Hiking five to seven hours a day, they gradually ascended to an elevation of 15,000 feet.

By the eighth day, three of nine hikers had dropped out, exhausted, Trevor said. Of the remaining six hikers, two opted to ride horses.

Trevor said he and his boys had no qualms about continuing on foot.

“We were just having fun the whole way,” he said. “It was the best father-son trip we had ever had.”

Ahead lay Thorung La, a pass 17,768 feet above sea level.

Their guide recommended they leave their camp, Thorung Phedi, in pre-dawn darkness, to avoid the high winds that whip the pass during the noon hour. They rose at 2:30 a.m. At 3, as they were about to depart, Trevor snapped the last of hundreds of photos.

Wearing head lanterns and down jackets, the hikers within 20 minutes became too warm. The group stopped to peel off a layer.

Then the rumbling started.

Excruciating pain tempered by faith

Timothy was standing between his father and brother. The boulder threw his body 30 feet.

“When I got to Timothy, there was no question he had been killed instantly,” his father said. Still, “I must have checked his pulse and his breath 150 times.”

A gynecologist and a medical student were among the hikers. He repeatedly asked them if they, too, were sure his son was gone.

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“When it happened,” Trevor said, “in spite of the most excruciating (emotional) pain I have ever experienced, there also came a certain knowledge that Timothy was OK. I don’t know how to explain that, except to say that we have built our marriage and our family on a foundation of faith in Jesus Christ.

“For reasons that we cannot explain, the time had come for Timothy to return to the father of us all.”

The Stansburys are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, better known as the Mormons. They attend the Little Miami congregation in Montgomery.

Becky was at church, helping with the youth group, when the call came from her husband at about 7:30 p.m. Friday.

She said her thoughts immediately turned to Natalie Fossier. The 9-year-old girl died outside her Miami Township home in February 2007, when an ice-covered tree limb fell on her while she was walking her dog

Natalie’s mother used to cut Trevor’s hair.

“Those discussions we had with her parents came back to me,” Becky said.

She told her husband: “You have nothing to be sorry about. It’s not your fault.”

In the midst of grief, a lesson learned

Timothy loved hiking and history. He played the French horn in concert band and mellophone in marching band. He was a voracious reader, who once angered his brother by taking one of his books into the shower. Sometimes at night he’d stay up past bedtime and read by flashlight under the covers.

“He was a bright light,” his father said.

The morning after learning of Timothy’s death, Becky asked her girls if they wanted to attend their scheduled music camp. They said yes.

Afterward, Hannah told her mother: “I learned something today – that Timothy would want us to continue to have fun. And I had fun. I don’t think he’d want us to lie around the house moping.”

It is, in a sense, an expression of faith. A belief that families are forever.

Trevor put it another way:

“If heavenly father determined that it was time for Timothy to return to heaven, then so be it. Becky and I will live our lives such that one day, through the grace of Jesus Christ, we are worthy to be with Timothy again.”